The Dink Network

Been a while since any new off-topic thread, ya read? Watchya reading? Discuss bound word paper stacks.

Dune is pretty neat.

We out here reading the Elder Scrolls books: The Infernal City and Lord of Souls.

I only finished The Infernal City for now, and it's UUUUUHHHH EEEHHHH UUUMMMMMMMMM EEEEEMMMM good.
Lots of alchemy. And new lore. And it's basically a fantasy book set in the elder scrolls universe than an elder scrolls book.
But its good nonetheless. I recommend it as a hardcore fan of the elder scrolls universe. Looking forward to continuing the story with the second book.

Dune is a great story.

I admit that I know nothing of the Elder Scrolls series.

At present, I'm reading a novel from my favorite Sci-Fi author, Peter Hamilton. I got started with him by reading the great series, "The Reality Disfunction". Today I'm reading "The Evolutionary Void". This novel brings back much in the way of previous characters and major parts of his "universe", while adding some new elements. And of course, we must save humanity (and other friendly alien intelligent beings) again.

i found an hp lovecraft collection recently, so im slowly goin through that.

Well, I once started reading Frankenstein, but didn't finish it.

@Skurn:

i found an hp lovecraft collection recently, so im slowly goin through that.

Cool! What unspeakable monsters and related horrors that drive men mad have you encountered lately?

@RangerLord:
Well, I once started reading Frankenstein, but didn't finish it.

What made you give up?

Youtube videos and video games. Basically, if I didn't have those I would watch many more movies and maybe even read books. It's kind of typical me. I watched Jurassic Park weeks after stopping it at the middle. By the way, the movie was not my favourite, I imagine it must have been better when it came out for it's special effects. Maybe it's just that it's story is kind of weak. But it raised an interesting question: Even if we could bring back the dinosaurs, should we? Is it worth the price? You know, Frankenstein is interesting. It's about a sentient creature that was abandened by his creator. Reading so far it seems a lot of trouble could have been avoided if Frankenstein would have been more responsible towards his creation.

I'm into hardcore SF as of this summer, and I'm currently reading Diaspora.

well i'm a few stories in. so far there's been a mutant dude in a cave, dagon, some immortal wizard dude, and maybe the first sort of kind of mention of azathoth. i skipped one with ye olde english i couldn't be bothered to read because of all the apostrophes and stuff.

aye! thou shalt read Brandon Sanderson!
thine enyes shall delight on his beauteous books

For those interested in genetics, I recommend "The Language of the Genes", by Steve Jones. This book dedicated to non-experts in biology, and it has a comprehensible approach to readers who aren't familiar of the terms and studies in genetics.

It's a genius's work, just unexplainably genius!

@Skurn:
well i'm a few stories in. so far there's been a mutant dude in a cave, dagon, some immortal wizard dude, and maybe the first sort of kind of mention of azathoth. i skipped one with ye olde english i couldn't be bothered to read because of all the apostrophes and stuff.

I always enjoyed the abject sense of horror that Mr. Lovecraft creates in his work using ancient alien entities, some things "man was not meant to know" and other sci-fi horror themes that many copied from him. Also, I always wondered if he lost any of his own marbles at the end, especially given his slow painful death from "the big C".

But, I also found his transparent racism rather disturbing, if perhaps somewhat tolerable given the era he was from. Have you come across any of that yet?

The same happened to me with Issac Asimov.
He also was from another age
It was just casual racism

@Silberfarben & (Skurn)

The same happened to me with Issac Asimov.
He also was from another age
It was just casual racism

I'd say that (from what I know of Isaac's work) that his examples of how earth colonists on mars were looked down up on by "real" earthlings was certainly racist in tone, but the fact that the story Isaac wrote eventually revealed one of the earth politicians that expressed such beliefs was named Hilder AND the fact that I.A. was a jew, meant that, if anything, I.A. was telling us he did not approve of the poisonous mental garbage of racism.

Whereas, H.P.'s racism took pretty ugly forms, such as stating how miscegenation was a terrible thing that could destroy this nation. He also once wrote a story that at first seemed to be describing mythical beasts living along a waterfront, that turned out to be various types of foreigners and "negros" as he called them. To be fair, H.P.'s achievements in his genre make him a towering literary great, but (IMHO) we cannot dismiss the real man that he was and the kind of things that were true horrors in his personality.

Indeed

however, I didn't just mean racism
more like gender disparity
it can be blamed on the age he was on of course

and some casual racism

unfortunately, on the creation of I am a moron and feel free to flame mes isn't in the compilation D:

but, shub-niggurath probably is.